Azure Document Intelligence is a Microsoft Azure cloud service that reads documents with AI models and returns their content as data. Microsoft now lists it as part of Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools. It uses OCR (optical character recognition, which turns an image of text into characters) and then finds the structure: key-value pairs, tables, titles, paragraphs and selection marks such as checkboxes.
A program sends a document, such as a scanned form, a receipt or an invoice, to the REST API and receives structured data back. The Layout model returns the text together with its structure; other prebuilt models read receipts, invoices, ID documents, W-2 tax forms and contracts. A customer can also train a custom extraction model on its own forms from only a few sample documents. The service runs in the Azure cloud, or in containers on premises and at the edge.
It is a pay-per-use cloud service billed per 1,000 pages, with a free tier of 500 pages a month and discounted monthly commitment tiers for high volume.